Motor Mouth: Here’s how to confuse a self-driving car

Self-driving cars have the potential to help many, but there are still many factors holding them back from widespread use.

Tony Avelar, AP Photo

Autonomous cars may be highly advanced — but, as it turns out, it's pretty easy to discombobulate the computerized vehicles

by
David Booth | December 18, 2015

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Why didn’t the Google car cross the road?

Because the drunk at the crosswalk couldn’t decide if he wanted to get to the other side.

That’s actually not a joke (at least, not a very good one, says the editor). It is — or soon will be — a real life automobile-pedestrian interaction that could confuse even the most computerized and laser-eyed self-driving car.

Or how about this one? The Washington Post recently reported how a Texas cyclist completely stymied a Google car. It seems that sometime this past August, a self-driving Lexus RX 450h and a cyclist on a training ride arrived at an Austin four-way stop at the same time, Silicon Valley’s finest arriving just “a fraction of a second before I did,” according to his post on the roadbikereview.com forum.

The problem started when the experienced cyclist — on a racing “fixed gear” bike — decided to do a “track stand” (i.e. to balance on two wheels) rather than stop completely with his feet down. Typically, as we’ve seen in numerous BMX “trick” videos and Olympic velodrome racing, this track standing involves some swaying back and forth as the bicyclist tries to maintain their balance.

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This seeming “indecision” totally discombobulated the poor computerized car. Programmed to be cautious, the Googlized Lexus responded to the bicyclist’s every movement like an indecisive teenager trying to ask the class prom queen on a first date. Reacting to the cyclist’s every rocking motion, the self-driving Lexus tried to cross the intersection in fits and starts.

“We repeated this little dance for about two full minutes,” the cyclist recalled, “and the car never made it past the middle of the intersection. The two guys inside were laughing and punching stuff into a laptop, I guess trying to modify some code to ‘teach’ the car something about how to deal with the situation.”

Laughing they may have been, but the encounter led to a recent patent revealing that the solution to such car-versus-pedestrian confusion may not be more computerization but better communication. According to U.S. patent number 9,196,164 B1, future Google cars may display digitized images to communicate with humans and digital displays that “text” the car’s intentions or instruction — “please cross the road” — to the pedestrian. Considering that the future might also be (silently) electric, Google is also considering audio “you may cross now” alerts. Google even proposes equipping its cars with a robotic arm that would “wave” pedestrians across intersections (no mention, by the way, of encryption to prevent anyone hacking the software to program the arm for the single-digit salute so useful in warding off bicycle couriers).

In this Thursday, Nov. 12, 2015 photo provided by Zandr Milewski, a California police officer pulls over a self-driving car specially designed by Google that was being tested on a local road in Mountain View, Calif. The police officer saw the car going a road-clogging 24 mph in a 35 mph zone and realized it was a Google Autonomous Vehicle. After getting closer to it he noticed that there was no one actually driving the car. The officer stopped the car and contacted the person behind the wheel to say the vehicle was impeding traffic, but he didn’t give out a citation.

There’s even mention of robotic eyes to emulate the eye-to-eye that “allows the pedestrian to recognize that the vehicle ‘sees’ the pedestrian.” Yes, finally, I will be able to use the expression Googly-eyed — immortalized by the flapper-era hit Barney Google (With the Goo-Goo-Googly Eyes) — in a road test. Who says autonomous automobiles won’t be any fun?

Google’s patent plainly states that current car-to-human communication is woefully inadequate if the driver is taken out of the equation. “Other than signaling devices typical to non-autonomous vehicles, such as turn signals, head lights, high beams, brake lights, reverse lights and some audible signals (horns, reverse light beepers, etc.), autonomous vehicles lack the capability to directly communicate the vehicle’s future behaviour,” Google says, noting that while a driver can wave, speak or flash their lights to a pedestrian, “simply stopping a vehicle without these driver-initiated signals may not be sufficiently reassuring to the pedestrian that it is indeed safe to cross.”

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And it is precisely this indecision in the man-versus-machine interaction that needs to be addressed. The latest accident involving a Google car had a human-driven car rear-end a Google autonomous vehicle in Mountain View, Calif. Looking for a better “view” for a right-hand turn at an intersection, the Google AV hesitated one too many times and was rear-ended by the distracted driver behind.

The other criticism Google hopes to address is the reduction of traffic flow autonomous cars could create. A Google car was pulled over on Nov. 12th (again in Mountain View, where the company has 18 self-driving Lexus hybrid SUVs and 23 of its own prototypes being tested) for driving only 24 miles per hour in a 35 mph zone (38 km/h in a 55 km/h zone). But that pales in comparison to the congestion a long string of tentative self-driving cars would cause if they can’t decipher what pedestrians intend and have no way of communicating theirs. Imagine the mayhem a single “track standing” cyclist might cause in downtown Toronto or Vancouver if all four opposing lanes were occupied by “confused’ autonomous cars. Two minutes might turn into two hours.

Futurist and Intel research scientist Dr. Jennifer Healey recently posited that autonomous vehicles would be so safe that “you could let your children play on the streets of New York.” Bicyclists balancing at Bay and Bloor — or Georgia and Burrard — might prove a bigger challenge. Not to mention drunks teetering at a stop sign.